Today the inquiry will hear from Martin Clarke, publisher of the Daily Mail's website, Mail Online.

Clarke joined the Daily Mail in 1987 before editing the Scotsman, the Daily Record and Sunday Mail. He took over MailOnline in 2006, when the website barely existed, and made it the most popular English-language newspaper website in the world by 2011.

He has a reputation for terrifying his subordinates – described as a composite of Kelvin MacKenzie, Piers Morgan and his editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre – but also known for his news judgement.

The inquiry will also hear from DCI Brendan Gilmour, who worked on the Scotland Yard's Operation Glade investigation into police corruption, and Russell Middleton, temporary assistant chief constable of Devon & Cornwall police. Gilmour will give evidence in private, but his voice will be broadcast on the inquiry website.

10.04am: The inquiry has started.

Lord Justice Leveson begins by referring to the open letter sent to the inquiry yesterday by pressure groups including Full Fact, English PEN and Index on Censorship.

These groups have urged the inquiry to reverse its decision to allow several government ministers early access to confidential documents by core participants.

Leveson is not happy that this letter was publicised before he was given the chance to deal with it.

10.08am: Leveson says he expects those government ministers who have been granted core participant status will restrict their confidentiality circle to the "minimum number necessary".

10.18am: Leveson says the groups have "fundamentally misunderstood" the purpose of redaction within the Inquiries Act.

He adds that redactions sought by government ministers will be treated in the same way as redactions sought by other core participants.

Leveson says he has not ruled out publicising attempts to make redactions, but he expects this to be extremely rare.

10.21am:David Barr, counsel to the inquiry, is up. He introduces a witness statement from the Met police about the interception of Milly Dowler's voicemails.

Leveson says that the circumstances surrounding the Dowler deletions is important background to the inquiry. He adds that the precise detail of "the extent that there was such interference is probably not going to inform my overall view of the culture, practices and ethics of the press".

He is happy that this evidence be read because he says it is part of the overall picture, but its significance should not be misunderstood.

10.23am:Neil Garnham QC, counsel for the Met police, is reading a witness statement from DCI John MacDonald.

Garnham says Scotland Yard has carried out an "hour by hour" reconstruction of events from the Dowler investigation.

Garnham says there is evidence to support the fact that Dowler's voicemails were intercepted.

10.29am: Garnham, for the Met police, is reading timings from Surrey police's family liaison officer's notes from the period.

He tells the inquiry there is no evidence to support the suggestion any journalist attempted to hack Dowler's phone before 26 March 2002.

A mobile phone operator told the Met police that voicemails would automatically be purged from Dowler's phone if they were more than 72 hours old.

10.31am: Milly Dowler last called her own voicemail on 20 March just after 5pm, says Garnham.

He tells the inquiry that the Met police believes there was an automatic deletion of individual voicemails once 72 hours had been reached.

"There needs to be an awareness that this explanation is from detectives from Operation Weeting," he says.

A voicemail platform migration occurred on 26 March 2002 and would have had the effect of resetting Milly Dowler's voicemail to an automated generic message. However, this occurred after 24 March when Mrs Dowler was able to leave a message on Milly's phone.

10.35am: Garnham, for the Met police, refers to a voicemail saved on 26 March 2002, meaning someone may have listened to that message after she had disappeared.

10.38am: On 26 March there was an "unsuccessful" attempt to record Milly's voicemails, according to One2One [now T-Mobile, a part of Everything Everywhere], Garnham says.

He says Milly Dowler's voicemails were migrated to a new platform by the mobile operator on 26 March. The Met police does not believe Surrey police were aware of the voicemail platform migration.

The phone provider said the reason old messages were not available to listen to on 17 April was because that function was removed 21 days after platform migration.

Milly's mail box was migrated on 26 March, so the option to listen to old messages (on the old platform) would have been removed on 16 April.

10.40am: Garnham says the Met police cannot rule out that someone unlawfully intercepted Milly Dowler's voicemails on 26 March 2002, after saying that "someone had accessed Milly's voicemail and listened to it" on that day.

He adds that the call data is not complete for various technical reasons, meaning that Scotland Yard still cannot have a clear picture of the issue.

The Met police says that "full clarity is unlikely to be provided" because of the technical issues.

10.42am: The Met police cannot conclusively say whether any voicemails were or were not manually deleted, Garnham tells the inquiry.

He says that two voicemail messages were missing on 17 April when they should have shown up in the police searches.

"It's not known why that happened," he says.

10.45am: Garnham says that reaching a definitive conclusion is not and may never be possible on the issue of manual deletions.

He says that the Guardian story in July 2011 and the Dowler's voicemails were not the only occasions when the issue was raised.

Garnham says manual deletions being the source of the Dowlers' "false hope" moment was speculated on in meetings between the family and the police in 2011.

10.49am: The Met police did not examine the manual deletions issue any further or seek to dissuade the Dowlers from their view, Garnham tells the inquiry. The force did not tell the Dowlers there was evidence that Milly's voicemails had been deleted.

He says it is not possible to state with any certainty that Dowler's voicemails were deleted.

Garnham tells the inquiry that one missing voicemail may have been subject to an illegal intercept in that 72-minute period between when it was read and saved, and when the Met police listened to it.

Garnham has completed DCI MacDonald's statement.

10.54am:Gill Phillips, the head of legal for the Guardian, refers to the evidence read moments ago by Neil Garnham QC for the Metropolitan police.

She says:

The Guardian welcomes the fact that the Metropolitan Police has modified its statement from last December. The Guardian has prepared its own timeline for the Inquiry which reflects its understanding of the relevant events, which it believes to be accurate.

The Guardian has no wish to cause any distress to the Dowler family. We also recognise the continuing need for care in reporting this matter given the on-going criminal investigation.

What DCI MacDonald's statement makes clear is that the following facts are now not in dispute:(para7) The News of the World hacked into the voice messages of Milly Dowler after she disappeared in March 2002.(para 27) The police have found evidence to suggest that somebody was manually deleting some of Milly's messages but they have been unable to identify the person responsible. They have also found evidence which suggests automatic deletion.(par 31) In April 2002 Surrey police made a connection between the apparent deletion of Milly's messages and the News of the World. (para 32) The manual deletion of the messages was discussed by Sally and Bob Dowler and the police during meetings in 2011. The Dowlers speculated to the police that their "false hope moment" was due to such manual deletion. Surrey Police continued to regard this link as "completely reasonable and absolutely possible" (par 34) and the Metropolitan police did not seek to dissuade Mr and Mrs Dowler from this belief. (par 33)The Guardian's story of 4 July 2011 was based on multiple sources and their state of knowledge at the time. Our error – as we acknowledged and corrected last December – was to have written about the cause of the deletions as a fact rather than as the belief of several people involved in the case. We regret that. After five more months of intensive inquiry, the police have found that the passage of time and the loss of evidence means that "reaching a definitive conclusion is not and may never be possible" (par 39)

10.58am: Counsel for News International Anthony White repeats the publisher's apology to the Dowler family.

White notes that the Metropolitan police have turned up no evidence that News International journalists deleted messages prior to the "false hope" moment.

10.59am:David Sherborne, counsel for the Dowler family and several other victims of press intrusion, is making a short statement.

He rebukes Surrey police for the force's "utter failure" to investigate the News of the World's activities in 2002.

Sherborne says there was a "lethal cocktail" of three ingredients in this matter: a failure by Surrey police; the Met police decision to close the original hacking investigation, and News of the World concealment of hacking.

11.03am: Sherborne argues that the Leveson inquiry would still have happened even if the Guardian's story of July 2011 had never appeared.

He says:

While some questions stay and may always remain unanswered there are some to which we do know the answer. The News of the World did hack into Milly Dowler's phone searching for a scoop at a time when she had already been murdered. That fact alone is horrifying enough.

We also know that the newspaper interfered seriously with the police investigation trying to use the information they had illegally obtained to get an exclusive on Milly's movements.

Thirdly this inquiry investigating as it has done the practices, culture and ethics of the press would have happened regardless of the question which arose at the start of the evidence that Sally Dowler's false hope moment may have been the result of activity of someone at or working for the newspaper.

The false hope moment and the News of the World's potential responsibility was not part of the decision to set up this inquiry in the first place.

11.10am: The inquiry is taking a short break.

11.13am: Sherborne says that a newspaper would without any compunction access the messages of a missing teenager showed the depths to which certain sections of the press were prepared to go.

"No one can possibly argue this inquiry was not entirely justified," says Sherborne.

Sherborne praises "the work of an investigative journalist prepared to get to the truth", a reference to the Guardian's Nick Davies.

He dismisses as wild suggestions that the News of the World should not have been shut down because it was not responsible for the false hope moment:

One should remember the industrial scale that such hacking took place and spread like a cancer through the newsroom and other floors of the News of the World … this newspaper was rotten to the core, that is why Mr Murdoch cut it out and we heard him say last week he wished he had done so sooner.

11.16am: Here is the statement from the Dowler family, read by Sherborne to the inquiry:

If Surrey police had prosecuted this activity in 2002 then the position would have been very different and perhaps countless others might also have been avoided having their private messages hacked into by the News of the World.

Police neglect and deference meant that it took the relentless efforts of one journalist to uncover what the police knew had gone on, and whilst we would never have wished to have been thrust into the middle of this extraordinary scandal on top of what we have already had to deal with as a family, we continue to have faith that his efforts and the efforts of the inquiry and Operation Weeting will have a lasting positive impact.

11.20am: The inquiry has now resumed.

DCI Brendan Gilmour, who worked on Scotland Yard's Operation Glade investigation into police corruption, is the next witness.

His is appearing in camera, with only his voice being transmitted through the inquiry live feeds.

He refers to "isolated and sporadic" incidents involving the police national computer.

11.32am: Gilmour says during the information commissioner's Operation Motorman investigation in 2003 the Met police discovered that a civilian employee, named Paul Marshall, was providing information from the police national computer to private detectives, which later ended up in newspapers.

He adds: "I recall reviewing Marshall's position ... it was relatively low risk, there wasn't a risk to life, there was more benefit in leaving him where he was in order to obtain the information."

Gilmour says that the Met police was "alive to the sensitivities of investigating journalists" but that there "wasn't any fear involved at all".

He adds that there was no trepidation about investigating journalists, but the force was alive to the attention it would attract.

11.36am: Robert Jay, counsel to the inquiry, questions Gilmour about the prosecution of journalists.

Gilmour says the police set up a covert investigation against Marshall. They discovered that another former officer, named Alan King, had made contact with Marshall and was arrested as a suspect in the investigation.

Jay asks whether charges of conspiracy were under consideration. "Yes," says Gilmour. "Conspiracy to commit misconduct, in the end."

Jay asks why journalists were not arrested in the same way.

Gilmour says that he secured the attendance of journalists through their newspapers' legal departments, which he could not do with King. The police interviewed seven journalists named on the ledgers kept by Steve Whittamore, the private investigator who was the focus of the information commissioner's Operation Motorman probe.

11.39am: The private investigator Steve Whittamore kept very detailed ledgers of his business, Gilmour says, from which the police drew their evidence.

"We had the invoice and the PNC audit trail which showed the checks had been done, and the invoices had gone to the newspapers … and the link to the journalists did exist, evidentially."

He adds: "Everything indicated [the journalists] were requesting the information."

11.41am: The journalists interviewed by the police said they believed the police information was coming from the courts, Gilmour tells the inquiry.

He says that these checks were being turned around in a matter of hours, and so it defied logic to believe the information was coming from the courts.

"They stuck with that line and all of them stated they would not have used Whittamore or any other agency if they knew that information was being obtained illegally," he adds.

Jay asks how quickly Whittamore could obtain the information.

Gilmour says:

Fast. We put that to the journalists ... quite a few of them said they thought the information was coming from the courts. We put it to them they couldn't possibly accept or assume that information would get turned around so quickly, in two or three hours in some cases. Without exception from memory they said that was genuinely where they thought it was from.

11.44am: Gilmour says that journalists were paying £200 or £300 per request.

Jay asks if it was put to the journalists that previous conviction details must have been obtained illegally.

Gilmour replies: "They pleaded ignorance. They said they would not have used Whittamore had they known the information was being obtained illegally."

He adds that the police could not prove guilty knowledge on behalf of the journalists.

Some of the journalists told the police that colleagues in the newsroom may have filed requests to Whittamore using one journalist's name, so attributing each of the requests would have been difficult.

11.46am: Gilmour says the police did not fear a backlash from the press about investigating journalists, but they did "expect a reaction".

We were aware it would cause a reaction and knew it would attract a lot of attention. We needed a system in place to manage the questions that would come in.

11.51am: Jay says that Gilmour said in a note at the time that "careful consideration" should be given to the journalists involved.

"This isn't my entry, I believe it's DS Tony Fuller," says Gilmour.

Asked what it means, Gilmour says: "I'm not in a position to answer that. I can give a view. I think it's because of the significance of what we were dealing with and recognising that significance, giving it due consideration and the fallout from what we were doing."

11.52am: The witness statement of the Met's DCI John MacDonald on the Milly Dowler voicemail interceptions, has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website.

11.54am: Jay refers to Gilmour's statement, which includes a meeting in November 2003 that he thought the journalists should have been arrested. He asks if Gilmour was overruled or if he changed his mind.

"I wasn't overruled," says Gilmour. "The evidence was being updated on a daily basis, as that assessment went on over a period of weeks or months I realised we had significant evidence to show that connection between the journalists and Whittamore.

"I then reconsidered the need to have to arrest the journalists and conduct any searches because I already had significant evidence ... the need to arrest diminished."

11.56am: Gilmour says the police could not discount that journalists would have been "forearmed" with responses to police questions.

"Generally speaking, it was along the same lines," he adds, of the answers given by journalists.

Jay says: "I suppose there are at least two inferences that can be drawn from that."

11.57am: The police interviewed Whittamore under caution, Gilmour says. He denied ever using an intermediary to access the police national computer.

Gilmour says this "didn't wear". "They were professional information gatherers, who would have recognised that you wouldn't have got this fast turnaround from a court … We didn't believe what they were saying."

11.57am: The Guardian's timeline on Milly Dowler voicemail interceptions has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website.

12.01pm: In March 2004, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advised that there was insufficient evidence to charge any of the journalists.

Gilmour says he was "disappointed" that the police had not gathered sufficient evidence to prove guilty knowledge on behalf of the journalists.

His force interviewed seven journalists: two freelancers, one News of the World reporter, one News of the World reporter in Scotland, one Daily Mirror reporter, one Sunday Mirror reporter and one Mail on Sunday reporter.

Gilmour says he was disappointed at the verdicts in court cases involving Whittamore and three associates.

Devon & Cornwall detectives investigated 37 people as part of the nationwide operation. Six men – two serving police officers, two former officers and two private investigators – were charged in 2004 after a two-year investigation, according to the Western Morning News.

12.23pm: Middleton says that the private investigator was passing confidential information to "three or four links up the chain", including insurance companies.

Jay tells the inquiry there was a link between the information and a company called Data Research in Surrey.

Middleton says the premises of Data Research were searched by the police and the Information Commissioner's Office on 8 March 2003.

12.24pm: Middleton says that journalists were not "out of scope" in this police investigation.

The flow of information was from a police officer to a private investigator to other companies, but the police never found evidence of direct requests from journalists, he adds.

12.29pm: Middleton reiterates that his force was "open minded" as to the prosecution of journalists, but did not have anything that "directly or indirectly" linked members of the media to the illicit information.

He confirms that two senior politicians were named in the information.

Jay asks whether this led Middleton to believe the press may be interested.

Middleton says it may have done, repeating that the investigation had not ruled out any specific avenue.

Briefing his colleagues on the success of Mail Online in November 2010, Clarke apparently said: "This shows that, firstly, I am a fucking genius, and secondly, that you are all doing really well."

2.11pm: Clarke has taken the stand.

He is being questioned by David Barr, counsel to the inquiry.

2.14pm: Clarke says he is responsible for both the editorial output of Mail Online and its commercial success.

"If we're not the biggest, we're very nearly the biggest – it depends which month you choose," says Clarke, of Mail Online's claim to being one of the most popular newspaper websites in the world.

Clarke does not believe a paywall is workable for general news, because of the proliferation of other news sources online.

2.16pm: Clarke says that mobile traffic to Mail Online is growing faster than its web traffic.

Editorially, Clarke reports to the editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, and commercially, to the managing editor of Associated Newspapers, Kevin Beatty.

He says he speaks to Dacre on a daily basis, but will never seek to persuade him to follow a particular editorial line on Mail Online.

2.19pm: Mail Online has about 70 journalists a day, based in London, Los Angeles and New York.

Barr asks whether these journalists follow the same procedure as the Daily Mail newspaper.

Clarke says Mail Online journalists are subject to the same contracts and HR procedures as the Daily Mail.

2.22pm: Clarke says Mail Online is happy to report what other reputable news organisations are reporting, although its journalists will attempt to stand the story up themselves.

He adds that this what any other 24-hour news channel would do, and that Mail Online would not publish something that did not come from a reputable source.

2.27pm: Clarke says the "vast majority" of Mail Online stories come from its own journalists or reputable agencies for a fee.

Mail Online journalists will also "monitor the Twittersphere," says Clarke. "Quite often the tweet will be the story," he adds, pointing out that journalists will check first if the tweet is genuinely from the person it purports to be from.

Clarke says Mail Online does not follow analytics of its most popular stories "slavishly".

The right-hand showbiz bar generates about a third of Mail Online traffic, Barr says, reading from Clarke's witness statement.

2.30pm: Leveson interjects to ask Clarke about Mail Online's readership in the US: does Mail Online comply with US law as it does with English law?

Clarke says that the site's American content is produced in compliance with US law and will be legally checked to those standards.

He adds that it becomes more difficult when content relates to both markets, and that is a problem the inquiry must grapple with.

2.32pm: Clarke says that Mail Online will not use pictures of Pippa Middleton going about her private daily activities because there is a voluntary ban among British news organisations.

However, this ban does not apply in the US and American websites use pictures of Middleton every day, he adds.

"That's a commercial disadvantage that I just have to live with," Clarke tells the inquiry.

"If we publish a story in this country it's visible all over the world," he adds.

2.35pm: Clarke says that the internet offers new chances to reach a global market:

This is Fleet Street's Big Bang – our chance to compete with the rest of the world.

He adds that he believes his main competition is AOL, Yahoo, and People magazine, not newspapers in the UK.

2.39pm: Clarke says this is a commercial disadvantage Mail Online is "happy to accept".

He adds: "It does put us at a competitive disadvantage … and it would be very difficult for us going forward if that regulatory environment became even stricter."

He warns that injunctions in the UK could put British newspaper websites at a further disadvantage.

2.43pm: Clarke warns again that if regulation was "significantly tightened" then that could harm the business of Mail Online.

He says: "We don't find the current regulatory environment too disabling [but there] are occasions when it can be frustrating or irritating."

Barr asks about standards.

Clarke describes standards as a "loaded term" and says that Mail Online will strive for accuracy, the most important standard.

2.45pm: Clarke says if the goalposts were shifted in relation to privacy then that would put Mail Online at a "competitive disadvantage against all sorts of people".

He refers to the Huffington Post, which he says would have an advantage over Mail Online if privacy laws changed in the UK.

Clarke complains that the Leveson inquiry has only heard from someone "very junior" from the Huffington Post. "You haven't called anyone senior," he says, before Barr moves on.

He adds that the Daily Mail is an "ethical, decent" newspaper run by good people.

2.50pm: Clarke says one of the benefits of the internet is that stories are iterative, and can be updated.

"Quite often we will correct content as we go along," Clarke says.

He adds that 99% of the time, complainants just want a story corrected rather than a published apology.

"It's an evolving animal of a product," he says.

2.56pm: Barr tells the inquiry that Mail Online has been subject to 205 legal complaints in the past three years, 35 of which were for privacy issues and three led to compensation payments in European courts. Mail Online has had six privacy complaints via the PCC.

He complains about French privacy law, which allows foreign nationals to sue over content published on a website based elsewhere in Europe.

Clarke says an unnamed French celebrity is trying to sue Mail Online for breach of privacy because of pictures "legitimately" taken in the US.

3.00pm: Clarke and Barr debate EU law.

Clarke concludes: "I'm explaining how difficult it is already, and if the bar was raised any higher it would cause problems for businesses like Mail Online."

3.00pm: The inquiry is now taking a short break.

3.07pm: The inquiry has resumed. Clarke says newspapers are just one news source publishing stories, including bloggers and Facebook.

He adds that there are problems getting bloggers to comply with any regulatory regime.

3.11pm: Clarke says he does not believe Twitter is "just people chattering in a pub".

He adds: "It's like giving everyone their own private radio station."

Barr asks whether Clarke believes that only online publishers that make money should be regulated.

Clarke says no "because then the Guardian wouldn't be regulated because they make no money".

Leveson interjects: "No, no, no, no, no, Mr Clarke."

3.15pm: Clarke says he is not arguing for looser regulation, but says it would be "very unpalatable" to be placed under "an even heavier" burden "when the rest of the internet is not placed under any regulation".

3.18pm: How far is the state willing to go to curtail private individuals' freedom of speech, asks Clarke.

He believes "the great harms" – of libel, of derailing a trial, etc – are catered for under current law.

Clarke adds: "I'm just cautioning that there is a growing part of the media that isn't subject to that, and we should be seen in that context."

3.21pm: Clarke is asked about the PCC.

He does not believe it is "as broken" as other witnesses to the inquiry have made out. Clarke goes on to tie the phone hacking issue to the PCC, before Leveson interjects.

"Mr Clarke, you're becoming an advocate," he warns, before saying that phone hacking was the "straw that broke that particular camel's back" but the PCC was labouring under other issues.

3.27pm: Clarke says he does not believe the internet should be regulated any more than you need "a policeman in the corner of every pub".

He describes the internet as a "democratising agent, allowing everyone to have a voice".

"People have a freedom of expression and we have to take the good with the bad," Clarke adds.

3.37pm: Barr asks Clarke about the Amanda Knox verdict when Mail Online published a full, false version of the story, along with other news websites.

Clarke says the story was a combination of "human error and overzealousness".

"The thing that made me angriest was that there was no need for it," he adds, adding that Mail Online did not need to publish a story so soon. He says "firm advice" was issued and an internal inquiry undertaken.

3.42pm: Barr asks Clarke about a Mail Online story published today about an actor in The Only Way is Essex.

He says that photographs in the article were taken with consent. "I will stake a year's salary on it," he adds.

"There's nothing wrong with showbiz. It's not a dirty word," Clarke says. "The only journalism that is truly free is profitable journalism … and I do that by building a website that people are interested in, and that includes showbiz."

3.45pm: Barr reads a number of witness statements into the inquiry, including evidence from the Guardian journalist Nick Davies, the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, the author JK Rowling and the MP Damian Green.

3.45pm: David Sherborne, counsel for the victims at the inquiry, is back on his feet to make an application with reference to evidence heard earlier today by police detective Brendan Gilmour.

3.51pm: David Sherborne, counsel for the victims at the inquiry, is back on his feet to make an application with reference to evidence heard earlier today by police detective Brendan Gilmour.

He is talking about Operation Motorman and the illicit trade in private information by newspapers.

He tells the inquiry that this was widespread in Fleet Street and is a "similarly dark art to hacking".

3.53pm: Sherborne says it is "not good enough" for journalists and editors to say that private investigators were mainly used to obtain contact information quickly.

He alleges that the information laid bare by Operation Motorman could not wholly have been obtained legitimately.

Sherborne does not believe this illicit trade of information by newspapers is historic. Newspapers continued to use the private investigator Steve Whittamore even after his office was raided and he was convicted, he says.

4.00pm: Sherborne says two questions need to be answered by newspapers over Operation Motorman.

1. What steps were taken in relation to those journalists who used Whittamore? Were they fired or promoted?

2. What happened to the private information obtained from Whittamore? Was it retained and reused?

4.03pm: Leveson says the factual framework of Sherborne's application does relate to the culture, practice and ethics of the press, but that the inquiry cannot delve into the detail of 10 years ago.

He says Sherborne's second question is of more significance than the first, because "that affects the here and now".

Sherborne says Operation Motorman is significant because of how newspapers reacted to the evidence: whether they accepted they had likely committed breaches of the Data Protection Act or not.

4.12pm: Sherborne says it boils down to this question: was it "cover-up or clean-up" for newspapers once Operation Motorman revealed what it did?

Leveson wonders whether it is possible to answer this question without delving into the facts in a way that would be outside the inquiry's terms of reference.